Gerard had been a greedy little baby. He made his mother’s life a living hell. His father would joke that he had been glued to her tit until all his teeth came in. His greed only multiplied as he aged. At 2 he stuffed himself full of berries, breads, milk, honey, snacked, and snacked until his belly was almost double the size of his head.
By the time he made it to pre-K, he had become adept at stealing snacks. He was so slick that he knew exactly the window between class and recess to sneak into each student's bags and take his pick without getting caught.
By 6 his parents had begun to get concerned. There was a meeting with a psychologist who could not, for the life of her, find anything wrong with greedy greedy Gerard. On his way out of the office, he stole the wooden toy train on the table by the door. When he got home he hid it deep in his chest of toys. Occasionally he would pull it out when he had eaten all he could and stared at it with a deep sense of satisfaction. He wondered sometimes what it would taste like.
It wasn’t until he was 12 that he had mastered the art of deception. It was also at 12 that the thing inside of him began to speak to him. It told him that with enough focus and practice, he could eat things that were not for eating. At first, he practiced on a bird. He managed to trap it by sitting extremely still with his hands extended full of seeds. The bird twisted and hawked and moaned. Gerard brought the bird to his mouth and inhaled thinking how delicious it would be to eat the bird’s ability to fly. He inhaled and inhaled and chewed and chewed until he could no longer taste the freedom of flight.
It made him dizzy, the sensation of eating flight. He felt powerful, stuffed, and uninhibited. He began to wonder what else he could eat. He flung the bird up as if to test if the voice inside him had lied and to test that he did manage to eat the bird's ability to fly. The bird plopped down as if a tiny brick was tied to its back. It let out a pathetic sad squeak as its body hit the concrete.
It would be a lie to say that Gerard did not feel sad for the bird but the voice in his head did not allow him to wallow. Instead, it forced him to focus on how flight felt rolling around in his belly. It felt like a breeze light, sweet, and tender. He stood up and left the bird behind walking as if he were on nimbus clouds.
By 16 Gerard had gotten a job. Mostly so he could support his greedy habits but, the money was never enough. In his wake, he left many birds flightless. He had graduated to eating from larger animals. He swallowed the stealth of several cats. It had an earthy musky flavor. He devoured the fennel-flavored bark of their neighbor's dog when his parents complained it was too loud. His neighbor frantically rushed it to the vet and could not for the life of her ever receive an answer as to why her dog went silent.
Eventually, the animals bored him. He had devoured enough of their skills to have amassed new strengths and talents. He struggled often to control them so as not to raise too much suspicion. In basketball, he sometimes jumped way too high. In track, he often ran way too fast. Once in one of the recurring fights for being called a freak, he punched way too hard after managing to consume the strength of a gorilla. The problem was that they never lasted and so he had to continue to find new sources to steal from.
By the time he was ready to graduate, he had begun to wonder what the taste of popularity was like. He waited patiently after basketball practice until his least favorite player was left. He cornered him, held him down, ate the feeling of popularity (it tasted like cherry blossoms), and ate the memories from his mind too.
The feeling was like electricity in his brain! Not only had he managed to eat the charm, eat the feeling of being loved (which had a warm vanilla taste), but he had also managed to eat the memory of the assault too (that one was bitter). He had never been so pleased with himself. He and his hungry inner voice were too stuffed full to feel even an ounce of guilt.
That night at the family dinner table the tension was low, lower than he could remember in a long time. He made his dad laugh, he made his mom blush with compliments and gentle teasing, and he made himself pretend that this was who he was a charming, polite, wonder. The hungry voice ate at his self-deceit gorging until it was too full to whisper.
By the time he got to college he was an expert at thieving. Gerard had learned from that night with his parents after he had taken what he wanted from the basketball player and applied it at college. He had eaten charm and turned it to others. Swallowed beauty and popularity and wielded it like a harpoon. He charmed his way into parties and exclusive clubs. Twice he had charmed his way into dates with two of the most popular freshmen girls on campus. Still, he felt an empty hole widening within himself.
He moved from consuming joy, charm, beauty, and popularity and started to feel hollow because it wasn’t who he was. He very often found that he could not separate the things he consumed from himself. The voice decided that the only answer was to bump the feeds from every week to every night. His campus began to be drab. Each person a walking shell of themselves until all that was left was misery.
He tried eating other things. He tried eating the strength of the trees, the firmness of the brick of the building, the brightness of statues, but none of them compared to what he ate from humans. He was stuck here for another few weeks and so with hunger gnawing, he decided to swallow their misery too. He could not bear the empty silence of himself or give the voice too much space to grow any louder.
The first time he ate misery it did not feel so bad. It had a stale sour taste that he found particularly fascinating. And so he chomped on more misery until eventually, he had eaten much of the misery on campus too.
On this night he found himself a group of two women and a man sitting drinking and crying in the trees behind his dorm. On any other day, they might’ve stood a chance 3 to 1 but he had spent a good bit of today eating the strength of concrete and so they did not stand a chance.
He dug in and chewed and chewed and found that this delicious mix of sadness and misery was intoxicating. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop until he had eaten every ounce of darkness in them.
For the first time since he could remember the voice was dead silent. Inside of him, he felt the darkness creeping about smudging through his membranes and cells as if consuming him back. He tried to speak but could not move. Instead, he felt a pressure building behind his eyes. His throat began to expand and it felt like tiny claws were grappling up. Before he knew it he was regurgitating a disgusting putrid black mass that reeked of the foulest muck he could imagine.
It started as a liquid but began to form into a solid mass with no eyes and a mouth large enough to swallow him whole. It had no teeth and he could tell it was a bottomless pit. He had vomited until he was truly empty resting wasted and powerless. Gerard felt that familiar hunger grow and crawled his way toward the growing black mass with what little strength he had. When he finally made it to the mass he started his familiar inhale and found that it was not enough.
He moved his arm up slowly and dragged a bit of the dark mass to his mouth and started to actually eat the object and not just its soul essence. The creature struggled but the more he struggled the greater the strength Gerard acquired from eating bits of the darkness.
It did not take long for Gerard to regain his strength and then surpass his former strength. Even his body began to change. His jaw got wide and his insides felt like an eternal empty pit. He reached for the bodies on the floor and started chewing on them too. By the time he had made his way through the second body, he realized that his mouth could expand more than ever before and so he swallowed the rest of the body in one gulp. He swallowed the other two with ease yet still the hunger punched explosively inside him. He needed more.
He was ravenous and turned his greedy jaws to the trees around him. Flavor did not matter. He chomped through the bark. Then, realized that there was more dirt in the world than trees so he started eating the ground. He swallowed the buildings on campus and swallowed the people on campus. He ate his way through entire cities gorging and gorging yet he was never full. He drank the ocean and made his way through all the wildlife, the magma, and the earth’s core. He had eaten the planet and was floating in space. He ate the darkness there. He swallowed the sun and burped its fiery molecular mess back out. He ate the burp too.
He couldn’t recall when he had begun to cry but he was bawling out into the vast emptiness of space yet he couldn’t help but swallow those tears too. He ate the galaxy, he ate wormholes, species, and alternate universes. He ate and ate until all that was left was himself.
And so Gerard digesting all of the universe and all the essence of all things howled into the vast emptiness of nothingness desperate to be heard and to be fed. He turned his mouth onto himself first eating his hands, then eating his feet, then curving his mouth in the most absurd way around his midsection, and then himself until he was nothing but a splash of nothingness not even the things whose essence he had swallowed remained. Not even the essence of the people he had murdered or the endless possibilities of the universes he had ended whispered in the empty space. Greedy Gerard was barely a vibration in the bowels of time wishing he had consumed himself first.
*I’ve finally set up a “buy me a coffee” page so if you’re not quite ready to become a paid subscriber but want to spare a little coin you can do so here!*
I wanted to make a really weird piece and really enjoyed writing this one. It’s a bit absurd and arguably a fable but I guess that depends on what lesson, if any, you took from it. There was some suggestion of changing the name but I decided to keep it. I’m curious if you all feel strongly about that let me know if you do or don’t. Thanks to all those who gave me feedback on this piece! Your time and thoughts are appreciated.
TELL ME:
Would you name this story something else? If you could eat one essence of something what would you choose? Is there a particular line or phrase that you really loved?
For all of you who have already subscribed thanks so much!!For those of you who haven’t subscribed yet, it’s never too late to join my smart and funny subscribers (nickname sadly still pending)!
As usual tune in next Tuesday for my next newsletter.
I got roped in immediately--myself becoming as greedy as Gerard, inhaling this gem letter by letter. I loved the premise of this tale. The writing, especially the ending, is phenomenal.
It builds wonderfully from a pretty simple beginning until it's taking in the whole universe with hugely ambitious sweep.
Really wonderful details of how these strange adventures felt and tasted.
Funny you ask about the title as I think more than a thief our protagonist is a consumer, a hungry hungry hippo of cosmic unsatisfied desire.